25-IV-2016.
A regular workday, except that Jan is on vacation and I'm waiting for two side projects to start. An interface to the SCI (which they read sky) for a clinic in Scotland, for which there's some thick paperwork to be submitted before we're even allowed to start (and I think we already took the money). I'm definitely not the guy to fill that, specially that I don't know the meaning of half the terms ("on the network" - which network, our internal, the whole of the interwebs, the NHS or its scottish equivalent, the VPN of the clinic, the N3 that NHS uses... which?) so that'll have to wait for David. The other is a conversion from Paradox (but only exported into .csv sheets, so I don't need to worry about the ODBC drivers, field formats etc). This is handled by Suez, but nothing came today... so, well, did almost nothing most of the morning because we lost power. A bit longer than usual, they keep replacing pieces of equipment every spring, but it usually takes just about 5 minutes. Which is still longer than what my UPS can hold, even though it's the biggest I could buy here - zmajček is simply too strong for it after the last souping up. This time, it was almost 20 minutes. Later I heard dad had a few hours break, they were replacing a whole transformer somewhere in the area.
Laura wants a period dialog for the SHET export, just like I did for them Belgians. Well, OK, I'm kind of idle.
That night I got a flu like I haven't had in a while. And still it's not one of those old ones I used to get a lot in adolescence, when it woudl tie me to the bed for a week. I get maybe quarter of the symptoms, and not all of them at the same time. This - no high temperature, no ache in the joints (which never was strong, just a feeling but not a pain), no sweat, no fever. Just random goosebumps over various areas of my back, depending on what I moved; cramps in my calves (which are always nearby the last five years) which actually developed into a dance the next night. And I slept at least for an hour every evening or afternoon, way beyond my usual 10-15 minute power naps. Weirdity.
This was shot on 29th. Let's see... on decomp, Dozois's sixth anthology which is not anthology (really, why does he avoid the word, is it copyrighted?)*. The white keyboard with media keys still works nice, probably the best one so far. I don't care that it is mac lookalike, it's just good.
On zmajček's monitors, Slant and spider solitaire in the Ubuntu window. On top, toolbar of bbLean. Top right, fox's command window, behind it its debugger. Behind that, top right corner, FooBar mrz player. The browser is Mozilla Firefox, with just two tabs (!) - I guess UA and Vukajlija. Vukajlija is the urban dictionary plus cheezburger network - the section with stories about various slang expressions and the other one with pictures with funny captions. I really tried to contribute by giving thumbs up and down for the latter section, strictly adhering to the site's guidelines (no repeats, no plagiarsm) where it was the same old all over again, or a bad translation or outright theft of something I saw elsewhere. Plus perhaps some 10% of my own whim. Turns out I was too negative, got oncunted** by the moderator and simply left the discussion. If you won't stand up for your own rules, just fuck off in long jumps. I actually had a few of my own contributions there, half of which were rejected, and the other half were very popular. The one I remember was dr Spock with the puny blaster they had in TOS, with „Beware Klingons, I have a glue gun“. The history, however, went in the other direction, the glue guns appeared at least twenty years after the blaster, and someone thought it would be cool if they resembled it.
And so it happened that the easter fell on first of may, just like it did in 1973 or so, happens every now and then. Made barbecue, she made a cake, brought dad for lunch, all fine and dandy.
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* As late as now (2024) it occurred to me that the publisher may have considered the word simply beyond the vocabulary of any potential SF reader. So if it doesn't help the sales, it must not appear anywhere.
** literal translation of „napičkati“, to chide severely without choosing words
Mentions: David Berton, decomp, fox, Jan Brenkelen, Laura O'Hare, SHET, Suez Lima, UbiquAgora (UA), zmajček, in serbian
30-IV-2016 - 31-X-2025